Free The Home for Wayward Clocks by Kathie Giorgio

supposed to love you.
    Imagine.
    You listen carefully to the conversations your classmates have in the lunchroom. There are some sad tales, tears shared when a child complains of a raised voice, or a spanking with an open palm, or being sent to a room for the rest of the night. These punished children speak of hating their mothers then, they say it out loud, with clogged and wet voices, “Oh, I hate her! I hate her! She is so mean!”
    Imagine hating your mother. You think of your spankings, with belts and wooden hairbrushes, that go on until your skin is ruptured and red. You think of her shriek, of the damp and dark of the root cellar, the days spent there. The nights. You think of sitting on your bed in your room, your arms crossed, your feet not even swinging, and how you control your breath to make the littlest inhale, the littlest exhale, and you try and you try and you try to be quiet, and yet somehow, she manages to even hear you think and so you are in her way again. You’ve always thought of yourself as a very naughty boy, even though you’re never quite sure what it is that you do.
    At the cafeteria table, you blink.
    Yet there are other times too. Times when your mother is asleep, curled in the warm bath of sunshine, and her hair is spread on the floor, and her face is smooth and thoughtless. The sun pinks her cheeks and she is so beautiful.
    And sometimes she remembers to make meals. She mostly remembers to buy food. Sometimes she sits right next to you at the table and she looks at you. She looks at you and you know from the steadiness of her eyes that she’s actually seeing you. And sometimes, rarely, she even smiles.
    No. You don’t hate your mother.
    Imagine.
    In the stories you read, it’s the stepmothers who are evil, who do mean things, and you consider that for a while. Maybe your mother is really your stepmother, and your real mother died at your birth and no one has ever told you about her. Your father never mentioned anything like that before he disappeared. He always referred to your mother as your mother. But maybe?
    Yet your hair is the same shade of blonde, and has that gentle wave in it that gets snarled if it’s not brushed enough. And your eyes are as blue as hers.
    You know she is your mother. You know this in the deepest way. She is your mother. You belong to her.
    And so you listen to the conversations, read your books, and wonder what it is that makes you so different. Why do other mothers reach out, draw children in with a hug, while your mother’s arm flares back, then connects with your cheek in a dizzying smack? Why do other mothers insist that their children go out for fresh air while yours is content to have you strain for the thin slat of sunshine coming between two bolted wooden doors? What have you done?
    What have you done?
    Imagine.
    James never understood what he did, not exactly. Sometimes, he thought his mother was so angry just because he breathed. Just because he’d been born. And as he sat through days and nights, either collared and leashed to the root cellar wall or locked in a dog kennel, sometimes with a bowl of water, sometimes not, sometimes with a bowl of whatever stale snack was in the pantry, sometimes not, the alarm clock ticking near his ear, the tiny baby blanket barely draped over his shoulders or resting on his knees, James often wished he’d never been born at all.
    T he graveyard clock was a sad clock and James knew it. Sadness was in its voice, in the slowness of its tick. He kept its black enameled cast iron body so shiny, it reflected the flames in the fireplace, licks of orange and yellow splintering the solid black. But even that glow couldn’t cheer this clock up. James felt its sorrow when he wound it every other week, in the catch in the gears that just couldn’t be repaired.
    James repaired this clock twice, lifted it from death and returned it to the light of day. The first time, years ago, a woman brought the clock to him. She said it